


The Price of Loyalty

by almostapalindrome



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Explicit Language, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Golden Deer Route, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Golden Deer Route Spoilers, Flashbacks, Golden Deer Felix Hugo Fraldarius, Golden Deer Sylvain Jose Gautier, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Mentioned Golden Deer Students (Fire Emblem), Mild Sexual Content, Post-Battle, Self-Reflection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-05
Updated: 2020-03-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:00:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23021365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/almostapalindrome/pseuds/almostapalindrome
Summary: Sylvain mourns the loss of Ingrid after the Battle of Gronder Field. Felix tries to be there for him.
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 2
Kudos: 35





	The Price of Loyalty

He was starting to question his place in all of this.

Sylvain lingered outside the door of a dorm room, not so far from his own, once inhabited by a pretty, green eyed girl who believed in a world where promises were kept and oaths of loyalty honored, even at the expense of one’s own life. A girl who wanted to be a knight, yet could not see that, long before she first took wooden lance to wicker training dummy, she was already a greater one than the most decorated of war veterans. Humility was but one of Ingrid Brandl Galatea’s many admirable qualities.

Or, had been, since Ingrid was no more.

He tried to convince himself it was not his fault, to lie his way into believing that, because his was not the hand that that slew her, he was somehow blameless in the killing of a girl he’d once loved as dearly as a sister. His constant companion, his voice of reason, wise as she was brave, even back when she wore her hair in two braids instead of one. She’d cut her hair short in the five years since the war began. Not long, he recalled, before he’d last seen her, when the war brought him through Galatea and he’d suggested that, perhaps, defecting to the Alliance was better than continuing to fight for the lost cause that was the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus.

That was where the lie began. In his heart, Sylvain knew that he’d killed Ingrid the moment he chose to leave. For how could he have ever expected a girl who placed duty above all else to turn her back on the Prince she served? She could never have betrayed her own nature or, more painfully, perhaps, the memory of her late betrothed, though nearly ten years had transpired since his death.

Sylvain sighed heavily, laying his grip on the doorknob and twisting. Painful though it was for him to be there, he did not know where else to go to reconcile his need to honor his memory of her. It wasn’t as if she’d had a proper burial. No, Ingrid’s body was reduced to ashes, burned on the makeshift pyre on the high ground of Gronder Field. The most defensible position, he recalled, that the three classes had all vied for control of in friendly competition during the Battle of the Eagle and Lion. They did not know then the weight that long-standing title would some day carry.

_If only it really had been the Battle of the Eagle and Lion. Then maybe it would have ended differently._

Claude had tried to reason with Dimitri. Tried to convince him to join forces against their common foe, but the prince would not listen. Could not listen, if his estimation was correct. Felix had seen the worst of it, but Sylvain knew of the darkness that dwelled within the outwardly courteous heir or Faerghus. His kingdom gone, and everything he’d ever loved taken from him, it was no surprise that Dimitri should be compelled solely by anger, blinded by anything but his desire to kill Edelgard and anyone who stood in the way of that want.

But Claude was not about to sit back and let his forces be overcome, just because he had no quarrel with the one Felix called “the boar”. The Alliance was the only hope Fódlan had of ever ending the Empire’s reign of tyranny that, no doubt, would extend past its borders to Almyra, Brigid and beyond. And so they fought back, Sylvain alongside them, crossing swords with longtime friends he now called foe.

He’d hardly even noticed her before she was upon him, darting swiftly on the back of her pegasus, hurling a javelin, aimed at his throat. He’d deflected it, mercifully, but Ingrid charged onward, sailing past him and directly to his commander, who’d stood her ground and brandished her Hero’s Relic. Byleth may have borne no ill will towards the girl, but she was not going to let herself be killed. And she certainly wasn’t going to allow anyone to kill her beloved former students.

“Ingrid,” she implored, “stand down, I am not your enemy.”

“We all choose our paths, professor,” she replied, “and I’ve chosen mine. I fight for my lord to the death!”

An arrow, fired by one of his allies–Sylvain hadn’t seen who–felled her steed, though whoever it was would not be the one to kill her. At the battle’s conclusion, he ran furiously in pursuit of Petra, the one who did, lance clutched in hand, cursing the weight of his platemail, eyes burning with rage. He was vaguely aware he’d been on horseback at the battle’s start, but could not recall why he no longer was. Perhaps he’d lept from his horse and to Ingrid’s side when she was cut down? Try as he might, he could not make his legs run any faster, though he pressed on, determined not to lose sight of Edelgard or any of her fleeing emissaries.

It wasn’t until he felt a pair of strong arms wrap about his shoulders that he realized he’d stopped dead in his tracks and that it was tears, not rage, that stung his eyes. That’s when he saw what became of the prince, the last remaining heir of the family his own had served for centuries. Collapsed on the ground, his life’s blood staining red the grass beneath him, as he was pierced repeatedly by the swords and spears of armored infantry, no more than Imperial cannon fodder.

“Look away, Sylvain,” Hilda commanded, tightening her grip on him.

Later she would say Dimitri deserved better, but Sylvain couldn’t help but wonder if he’d gotten exactly what he deserved, a man lost to his own darkness, unable to differentiate friend from foe. If only he had listened, then Ingrid might have lived.

Marianne had rescued his horse, but he was deemed unfit to ride and so he remained with Hilda, chest pressed against her back, arms firmly about her waist, atop her wyvern on the journey back to Garreg Mach. He’d been delivered directly to the infirmary, though the emotional damage he’d sustained far outweighed the physical. Mercedes stroked his brow and chattered cheerfully to him until he fell asleep. He awoke hours later in his own bed, a note from Hilda reading “Sorry, I know you don’t like flowers” along with a bundle of daffodils in a metal vase on the table by his headboard.

He smiled softly thinking of them, his grip on Ingrid’s door handle loosening as he hesitated a moment longer. There was a time when he might have sought solace in Hilda’s bed, as he had on occasion when they were students, but those days had long since passed. She was a soldier, and a bright one, in many ways the right hand to the leader of the Alliance. And he…

He was a traitor. Not that he really believed that, but anything less than absolute loyalty to his homeland, his family, the lord whom he served would have been treason in Ingrid’s eyes. While he’d lacked the strength to kill her, he was certain that she would not have hesitated to kill him.

He pressed the door open and stepped inside, his footsteps, muted though they were by the plush blue carpet, the only sound disturbing the deafening silence. There were still remnants of her everywhere. A book on the history of the Knights of Seiros lay book marked on her bed, another pile on the shelf by the window waiting to be returned to the library. A map of Fódlan, upon which she’d made detailed notes about terrain and tactics spread out upon her desk, a quill resting in an inkwell long since dried up, placed neatly beside it. And a vase of dehydrated stems, sitting in ashen dust that had once been petals, positioned in a similar fashion to the one that currently brightened his own room.

They’ll die too eventually, he thought idly dragging a finger through the dust pile. Only I’ll throw them away before they wither and fade into nothingness like these ones.

Perhaps it was better to die young, instead of slowly wilting and weakening with age. Sylvain had always fought with little regard for his own life. Maybe that was part of the reason why.

“I thought I might find you here,” a stoic, resonant voice, he recognized as belonging to Felix remarked and Sylvain was suddenly reminded that he had not shut the door behind him. “You’re a sentimental fool, much as you might try and deny it.”

Sylvain turned to face him and shrugged. “Well, you know I was never one to forget a pretty face.”

Felix scowled and Sylvain’s feigned bravado immediately dissipated. “I’m sorry. Old habits don’t die so easily it seems. And she really was pretty.”

“‘Was’ being the operative word,” Felix retorted. “Now she’s dead. Moping about in a room she used to sleep in isn’t going to bring her back.”

“That’s not…” Sylvain struggled to reply, taken aback by Felix’s bluntness. “I know that. Felix, she was our friend, surely you must feel some grief over her death? We were together since we were children–“

“Ingrid made her choice,” Felix interrupted. “And died for it.”

“She died defending Dimitri.”

“Just like she always wanted,” Felix said flatly.

“Felix,” Sylvain, gasped, his voice catching as he fought the threat of fresh tears, “you don’t really believe that.”

“Yes I do,” he replied. “She wanted to be just like Glenn. Well, she got her wish.”

Felix moved to stand beside him, his gaze falling to the patterns in the dust on the table traced by Sylvain’s fingertips.

“I guess you’re right,” Sylvain conceded, eyes lifting up towards the ceiling, envisioning the sky beyond, tears rolling silently down his cheeks. “I just hope that, if there is, ya know, something else, that they find each other there.”

“They deserve each other honestly,” Felix grumbled. “Fools who died for nothing.”

“That’s not what they thought, Felix.”

“What they thought was pointless.”

For a moment, Sylvain said nothing, searching for the words to convey what he needed. His heart ached at the loss of his friend but, more than anything, he just wanted someone else to feel what he was feeling. He knew he was unlikely to get that sympathy from Felix, despite the fact he’d been even closer to the fallen Ingrid than Sylvain himself. After all, she was, at one time, meant to become his sister.

“I know how you feel about the circumstances surrounding your brother’s death,” Sylvain said finally. “And I see how Ingrid’s death is very much the same.”

Felix laughed. Not a warm, joyous laugh, but pained and almost manic. “‘Very much’ the same? It’s exactly the same. They both died for a prince too far gone to care or even notice.”

“You don’t know that,” Sylvain tried to protest.

“You saw him Sylvain. You saw the boar. The mindless creature so intent on killing one girl that he saw everyone else as an obstacle and therefore an enemy to him.” Felix’s voice quivered with anger and his arms stiffened by his sides.

Sylvain moved closer to him, gingerly reaching out a hand, entwining his long fingers with Felix’s shorter ones. Felix bolted away abruptly, pulling his hand free with such force that he stumbled into the table, knocking the vase to the ground. It surely would have shattered, had it not landed squarely on the carpet, with a dull “thud”.

“Don’t touch me!” He cried, folding his arms across his chest and gripping at his shoulders.

“I’m sorry!” Sylvain cried back, and he meant it. “I just didn’t want to be alone with my feelings.”

“You’re not,” Felix insisted. “I’m here, aren’t I? Why else do you think I came to find you wallowing? Just don’t expect me to share them.”

Sylvain sniffled. He hated how much his nose ran when he cried. “Of course.” He agreed. “I’ve known you long enough to know you’re not the sentimental type. Anymore, anyway.”

“I cried most of my tears when I was a child,” Felix said. “And the rest after Duscur. I haven’t got any left in me.”

Sylvain chortled joylessly. “You were quite the crier when you were little,” he remarked, then added, “well, littler than you are now.” It didn’t quite have the same ring to it as his usual good-natured teasing, but the intent was sincere.

Met, blessedly, with a fist to the shoulder, courtesy of Felix. It didn’t hurt but Saints, it felt good to feel _something_ other than the pain gnawing at his heart.

“I’m only stating facts Felix,” Sylvain laughed. “I like how little you are. Makes you hard to hit. Easier to protect.”

“Sylvain,” Felix breathed, “don’t protect me. Please, I…” He hesitated, his first opening up, palm moving to rest on Sylvain’s shoulder and grip it tightly.

“You what, Felix?” Sylvain asked. He placed his own hand firmly on top of Felix’s. And this time, Felix remained. Even relaxed a little, maybe.

“I don’t want anyone to die for me,” he said finally. “I’m not like _him_.”

Sylvain pressed his free hand beneath Felix’s downturned chin, forcing him to meet his gaze. “Hey. I’m not gonna die protecting you. Because if I did, I’d worry about you every hour of every day.”

“You wouldn’t worry about anything Sylvain, you’d be dead.”

“You know what I mean,” Syvlain said softly. “Besides, it’s no problem if you protect me. You will protect me, won’t you Felix?”

Felix nodded. “Now let me go,” he commanded, “before I start getting soft and sad like you.”

“Soft and sad?” Sylvain scoffed, letting go and stumbling back in feigned indignation. “Is that really what you think of me? I guess I’ll just go write sad poems in my journal about this egregious treatment by the person whom I hold most dear!”

“Goodbye Sylvain,” Felix said, turning on his heel and advancing towards the still open door.

“Can I at least kiss you before you run off and work yourself half to death mowing down straw dummies or whatever it is you do in the training grounds all on your own?” Sylvain called after him.

“No,” Felix replied, not bothering to turn around. “I might catch sadness.”

And though he could not see it, Sylvain could clearly hear the subtle smile in Felix’s voice. That was enough to make him smile, sincerely, and forget for a moment that the only person he’d ever loved nearly as well, was gone. 

When Felix was out of sight, he sat on Ingrid’s bed and wondered what she would have thought. Would she scold him for the way he carried on with Felix? Could she have ever believed that he could care so completely for another person? She’d had to “clean up” after him, so to speak, so many times…

“I’m sorry Ingrid,” he said aloud, hoping that maybe, somewhere, she could hear him. “I wish you could see the man I’ve become. I hope that he is someone you could be proud to call ‘friend’.”

...

He awoke that night to a soft knock on his door. Felix crawled into his bed, tangled his fingers in Sylvain’s hair, and Sylvain kissed him while he cried. Felix confessed that it was his arrow that shot Ingrid down and blamed himself for her death. Sylvain tightened his embrace around him and assured him that Lysithea, Claude, the professor, or any one of their allies, their friends, might have died if he hadn’t. And truly he hadn’t killed her, though Sylvain was not naive enough to pretend Felix had played no part in her death. Not when he’d finally come to terms with his own guilt.

“Ingrid made her choice, my love,” Sylvain said solemnly, echoing Felix’s words from earlier that day. “I’m certain that, for her, it was the right one.”

“And did _we_ make the right choice?” Felix asked, his voice little more than a whisper.

Sylvain thought for a moment. Thought about his childhood in the frozen reaches of the north. About the first time he saw Felix, a tiny toddler face, barely visible through a mountain of furs and overcoats. He thought of holding him, much as he did now, while he cried about Dimitri refusing to trade Relics with him because Felix wanted a weapon he could stab things with, not some stupid shield. Sylvain hadn’t the heart to tell Felix that the Relic would go to his elder brother anyway. He thought of his father, showing him the Lance of Ruin, how proud he was to finally have a son who could wield it. And of Miklan playing with him in the ocean, in the southern territories of the Alliance on holiday, laughing, smiling, lifting him up by the waist and tossing him gently. Grabbing hold of his hands and spinning him around. Grasping at his shoulders, and pushing him beneath the oncoming waves, pressing him downward and downward. Waking up on the shore in his mother’s arms, his hair tangled and matted with wet sand, coughing up saltwater.

He thought of Ingrid, weeping by Glenn’s graveside while her father wasted no time in seeking new marriage prospects. He thought of Rodrigue, lauding the bravery of his dead son while failing to console the one who still lived. And he thought of a monster, who had once been his brother, driven insane by a title and weapon he could never inherit and a family who would not love him.

He also thought of Claude, excitedly scratching out the lines on maps indicating the borders between kingdoms, of Hilda, and her father and brother who adored her. Of Lysithea, the horrible things that had been done to her for the sake of crest research. And he thought of the professor who never knew she had a crest and never cared when she learned she did. The professor for whom he turned his back first on a class of childhood friends, and then on king and country when what had been his new class became his chosen side of the war.

He recalled the day that Felix first turned up in the Golden Deer classroom, months after he had thrown himself, and a little too eagerly, at the mysterious new professor. Of course, Felix was already there and seated beside Leonie by the time Sylvain had stumbled in, still half asleep after another night of living up to his ne’er-do-well reputation. He sat at the desk behind him and gaped in silent disbelief, recalling how his oldest friend had berated him for so easily abandoning everyone he’d ever known and cared for at the sight of a new pretty face.

“Stop staring,” Felix had commanded angrily.

“I,” Sylvain had begun, at a loss for words. “I just didn’t expect to see you here. Not after that lecture you gave me about lacking principles or whatever it was I had done to disappoint you.”

“Hm. I don’t seem to recall that. I said you were too quick to change allegiances for the sake of some woman.”

“And yet here you are,” Sylvain smirked. He leaned forward on the desk and grabbed his quill, playfully extending it to brush the back of Felix’s neck. “Don’t tell me you switched classes for me?”

Felix batted it away, not turning to face him. “You’re delusional if you think this has anything to do with you. You may be a good-for-nothing who’d turn his back on his own kingdom for a passing attraction, but it turns out you may be smarter than you look. Professor Byleth has real world experience and her skill with a sword far surpasses anyone else at Garreg Mach. I’m done wasting my time in another class.”

“I’ve been trying to tell you that for months,” Leonie chimed in. “She’s Jeralt’s kid. Of course she’s the best. Well, the second best, after him anyway.”

“Sorry, can we go back to the part where you complimented me?” Sylvain asked, ignoring Leonie’s predictable comment.

“No,” Felix said firmly, “And it will never happen again.”

Sylvain had laughed heartily and leaned back in his chair, Mercedes, who’d joined the Golden Deer class several weeks prior, cheerfully observing the interaction from the seat next to his. Four months later, Edelgard’s army lay siege to Garreg Mach, and the Archbishop and professor disappeared, and Sylvain, against his better judgement, fled home. Home to his father and a fight to save what amounted to nothing. A murdered regent, a mad prince, and a “holy woman” who was almost certainly a subordinate of the Empire. Or, at the very least, loyal to them.

Still he fought tirelessly, battle after battle, always unsure whether or not he’d live to see the next. Sylvain may have changed classes with ease, but his waning loyalty to the Kingdom had not died out entirely. He spent hours sitting on war councils, going cross eyed as his father, Rodrigue and a rapidly dwindling menagerie of other Eastern Kingdom lords and landholders devised an endless array of ill conceived plans to reclaim Fhirdiad. One such plan sent him and Felix both on a trek into Sreng, the hope being that that they might avoid notice by disappearing North before descending upon the Capital via the Western shore route. It had resulted in the majority of their poorly provisioned Battalion dying of frostbite, and Felix, Sylvain and those who remained waiting out a blizzard, huddled in a cave before abandoning their mission and returning to Gautier territory.

On the eve of their return, they lay in each other's arms in Sylvain’s bedchamber. They were not yet lovers, but almost freezing to death in the bitter wasteland of Sreng, made any number of quilts, and furs and even the fire that blazed in the hearth feel empty in comparison to the heat from another body, of flesh, blood, and a beating heart. Sylvain could feel Felix’s hammering in his chest as he slowly undressed him, his lips, settling into the crook of the smaller man’s neck, his hands roaming tentatively, seeking permission to touch, which Felix granted and returned in kind. Felix fumbled with the waistband of Sylvains’ trousers, trying inelegantly to rid him of them. Sylvain shifted to assist, hungrily reattaching his mouth to Felix’s once he had successfully disrobed, intent on devouring every inch of him. And devour he did, driven half-mad with desire, pressing him down in the mattress and fucking him, hard, forgetting, for a moment, as Felix’s teeth grazed his shoulder and he cried out his name, about the war they were losing in which neither of them could possibly last another fortnite.

Sylvain awoke the next morning to find Felix already bathed and dressed, standing in his bedroom window, looking out on the horizon. He approached him slowly, throwing on a dressing gown in a small gesture of modesty, though the Goddess knew they were far beyond that now.

“I think we miscalculated our direction of travel,” Felix said, eyes still transfixed on the long neglected, mostly dead gardens outside.

“You can’t mean you want to go back.” It wasn’t a question. Sylvain could not fathom the idea that Felix, who loathed chivalry and self-sacrifice could possibly want to throw away his life for a lost cause. If he did though, Sylvain knew he would follow him. Uncertain though he was what Felix might feel for him, now that they had crossed the increasingly blurred line between friendship and whatever else they were going to be, Sylvain was quite sure he wanted to hold onto whatever that something else was.

“No. You’re right, I don’t,” Felix agreed. “By my estimation, we’re in the final week of the Wyvern Moon.”

“I’ll take your word for it. I must confess, the days have all begun to blend together for me. I’ve lost track of time.”

Sylvain took the last few steps to close the distance between them, Felix’s back still to him as he continued to stare out of the window. The once brash and careless heir of Gautier, tentatively placed a hand on his old friend’s shoulder, grasping gently. To his relief, Felix leaned into his touch, pressing back against him and guiding his arms to rest firmly about his waist.

“So we were going the wrong way then,” Felix insisted, relaxing into Sylvain’s embrace. “Did we not promise that we’d return to Garreg Mach at the end of this month?”

“We did,” Sylvain agreed, recalling how he, Hilda, and Dorothea had tried to conceal how drunk they were at the feast following the Battle of Eagle and Lion, the night that promise was made. At least they’d done better than Claude, who disappeared for a couple hours to sleep off a “food coma”.

“I think we ought to keep that promise.” Felix shifted to face him, resting his cheek against his chest.

Sylvain gently kissed the top of his head. “We’ll go then,” he said. “I’m not in the business of making promises I don’t keep.”

And for the first time in the nearly five years since the war began, Sylvain recalled, he’d felt hopeful, like the happiness he’d lived during their time at the Officer’s Academy might be regained simply by going back to the place where he’d had it.

They’d passed through Galatea on their journey south, but Ingrid had already gone to Fhirdiad, hoping to rescue Dimitri no doubt, or die trying. At least they had both lived long enough for her to serve him as the knight she’d always wanted to be. Ingrid Brandl Galatea remained true to who she was until her final breath. Sylvain owed it to her to at least try and do the same. Lying there in a dorm room, with the only person he’d ever wanted to remain faithful to, on the side of a war fighting for a future where she might have been able to be a knight, instead of being obligated to become some nobleman’s wife, Sylvain thought he was finally beginning to understand who he was. Or, at least, who he intended to be.

“Yes Felix,” he replied finally, “We did.”

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't recruit Ingrid on my Golden Deer play through, so I had to kill her (she was too strong and could fly!). I've also never played Blue Lions and, the way Dimitri is portrayed in all other routes, I have a hard time believing Felix and Sylvain would stay loyal to Faerghus. Them switching sides but Ingrid staying makes so much sense...so I wrote about it.


End file.
